Head-on | Could Usha Vance, a practising Hindu, be next US First Lady?

United States Vice President JD Vance is widely regarded as the heir apparent to US President Donald Trump.

Vance has few rivals in the MAGA (Make America Great Again) universe. Cuban-origin Secretary of State Marco Rubio doesn’t have Vance’s appeal in the deep red states where the next US presidential elections will be won or lost.

Rubio’s central role in the US attack on Venezuela has not endeared him to America’s large Hispanic, Spanish-speaking population. Congressional midterm elections in 2026 will show which way the political wind is blowing.

Trump has often hinted that Vance could be his successor to lead the Republican party into the 2028 presidential election. He has reluctantly abandoned his own bid for a third term which the US Constitution expressly prohibits.

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Trump knows time is running out on his presidency. The US Supreme Court will soon deliver its verdict on whether Washington’s trade tariffs are lawful. A defeat for Trump in America’s highest court could tar the remaining three years of his term.

By January 2027, attention will anyway swing away from 80-year-old Trump to the 2028 presidential primaries. Vance is likely to be the Republican nominee but a Vance win is not guaranteed.

Recent opinion polls show the Republican party could lose the House of Representatives to the Democrats in 2026. The Senate is likely to stay with the Republicans, albeit with a reduced majority.

Vance himself is not popular with the mainstream Republican party. His background as a southern hillbilly jars with many Americans. Though the US has always had a racist core, that core has been mainstreamed by Trump and his White supremacist followers.

Vance belongs to this demographic but he is also married to Indian-origin Usha Chilukuri, whose family migrated to the US from Andhra Pradesh in the 1980s. Usha has a bachelor’s degree in history from Yale University, a master’s degree in philosophy from Cambridge University and a doctorate from Yale Law School. She had a stellar legal practice till 2024 when she resigned to, as she said, “care for our family”.

Usha is a practising Hindu but her three mixed-race children are being brought up as Christians. They attend church regularly. Usha herself has resisted pressure to convert to Christianity. Vance was an evangelical before converting to Catholicism.

Social media abuse directed at Usha has peaked ever since it became clear that she could be America’s next First Lady if Vance succeeds Trump as president in the 2028 presidential election. It is a measure of rising animosity against Indians in MAGA-led America that the country was comfortable with a Black First Lady in Michelle Obama but not a Hindu First Lady.

This is a consequence of the Christian nationalism that has fuelled the MAGA movement. Charlie Kirk, who was assassinated last year, led the movement. Nick Fuentes has taken over his mantle but has even more incendiary views.  He is anti-Jew and anti-Islam and a vocal admirer of Adolf Hitler.

American politics is now a MAGA snake-pit with hate and abuse proliferating on social media, from X and Instagram to YouTube and podcasts. If he wins the Republican primaries as the party’s presidential nominee in 2028, Vance’s politics will come under intense scrutiny.

Vance has frequently decried growing Islamic influence in Western Europe. Like Trump, Vance is splenetically anti-immigration. But unlike Trump and other members of the Trump cabinet, he does not vent his spleen against legal migrants. He reserves that for unchecked immigration into Europe.

At his landmark address at the 2025 Munich Security Conference in February 2025, Vance warned an audience of top European political and military leaders: “Free speech, I fear, is in retreat.” Vance was referring to censorship of conservative and religious speech across Western Europe but especially in Britain. Like Trump too, Vance has been strongly critical of London Mayor Sadiq Khan whom he blames for allowing Islamists free rein in the British capital.

Vance is more favourably disposed towards India. During a visit to New Delhi last April, Vance took his family to meet Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Vance called Modi “a great leader” and said that it was an honour to meet him. He added that the prime minister was “incredibly kind to my family”.

But make no mistake. If he does win the US presidency in 2028, Vance will be bound by US policy that regards India as a potential long-term adversary. When US policymakers speak of the India-US relationship as one of the most defining of the 21st century, what they mean is that India’s inevitable growth to become the world’s third largest economic power can pose a future geopolitical challenge for the US that needs to be managed.

Washington was so focused for decades on the Cold War with the Soviet Union that it overlooked the rapid emergence of China as a greater economic and technological threat than the Soviet Union was. China’s GDP nearly doubled from $6.1 trillion in 2010 to $11.23 trillion in 2016, catching Washington unawares.

With global institutions projecting India’s GDP to close the gap with both the US and China by 2050, Washington does not want to be taken by surprise by a second Asian challenger it underestimated. This realisation is at the heart of America’s self-image of a global hegemon. India’s policy of strategic autonomy grates on Washington.

Whether JD Vance and Usha occupy the White House, or a Democrat wins the next presidential election, US policy on India will continue to reflect its hegemonistic instinct.

(The writer is an editor, author and publisher. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.)